Yugoslav Army soldiers, in the rear, and Serbian volunteers escort a Croat civilian after they entered Vukovar on November 18, 1991.

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Did The Army That Gave Birth To Yugoslavia Also Destroy It?

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The conclusions of a new study out of Belgrade on the role of the Yugoslav People's Army (JNA) in the Balkan wars of the 1990s include one finding that might shock some readers. The Center for Humanitarian Law in the Serbian capital appears to be saying that the army that gave birth to Yugoslavia eventually also destroyed it.

The study covers the decade, from the early 1980s to 1992, leading up to the collapse of the Yugoslav federation and analyzes the transformation of the JNA from an armed force that was as ethnically mixed as the country it was meant to protect, to one that was effectively an ethnic Serb army.

The roots of the JNA lay in the antifascist resistance to the Nazi occupation of Yugoslavia (1941-45). The leader of that resistance movement, and later president of Yugoslavia, Josip Broz Tito, was of Croat-Slovene parentage, and the partisan forces that liberated the country in 1945 reflected its ethnic diversity -- including Serbs, Croats, Muslims, Slovenes, Macedonians, and others. The JNA in the postwar decades was equally mixed and was seen as a bedrock of national unity -- not only in the sense that the army was the country's first line of defense, but also in that it was an institution that instilled the values of togetherness and coexistence.

But his comprehensive new study appears to show that the JNA was not simply a bystander or victim of the breakup of Yugoslavia but was instrumental in its collapse and actively placed itself on the side of ethnic Serbs in Croatia and Bosnia, preparing the ground for, or committing atrocities against, ethnic Croats and Muslims.

Speaking to RFE/RL's Belgrade bureau, the Center for Humanitarian Law's Nemanja Stjepanovic said the roughly 100-page study was published in order to preserve the accounts of perpetrators and victims of war crimes, as well as to show how the JNA transformed itself into a Serb army and chose sides in the conflict.

This photo, taken on March 8, 1993, shows people carrying away a man wounded by a shell that fell near the television station in Sarajevo.

That alleged transformation, which the study says began in the late 1980s, made it possible for Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic to take control of the JNA and use it for political ends.

The report arguably marks the first comprehensive study to conclude -- based on documentary evidence -- that the Bosnian Serb Army that seemingly emerged out of nowhere in 1992 was a creation of the JNA, to the extent that units of the JNA simply changed their name and insignia without changing the command structure, equipment supply, or financing.

The ostensible purpose of this JNA-backed Bosnian Serb Army was to defend ethnic Serbs in Bosnia. But in the course of this act of "self-defense," numerous crimes were committed, some directly by the JNA and others with its assistance, according to Stjepanovic, one of the co-authors of the study.

Among other things, Stjepanovic noted that the JNA handed over prisoners of war and captured civilians of other ethnicities to Serb forces (often former JNA units) without regard to their fate.

Dejan Jovic, political science professor at both Zagreb and Belgrade universities, said he believes that all of the former Yugoslav states are guilty of the "selective interpretation" of events of the 1990s, based on the "obscuring or twisting of facts."

A Bosnian soldier returns fire on April 6, 1992, in downtown Sarajevo as he and civilians come under fire.

Jovic, therefore, highlights the importance of the international tribunal in The Hague, which has brought to light numerous documents that would otherwise have been inaccessible to the public.

However, Jovic insisted that this new study has shattered the image of the JNA as a force of integration and a “guardian of Yugoslavia.”

Indeed, one of the study's key conclusions is that the disintegration of Yugoslavia and the JNA’s transformation from a "Yugoslav" to a "Serb" army were concurrent, intertwined processes.

Vukovar in ruins in October 1992

Military service was compulsory in Yugoslavia, so nearly every adult male citizen had experienced being part of the JNA, and many developed a bond with the national army. What few could have imagined is that the JNA's guns would be turned on Yugoslav cities, but that is precisely what happened. In 1991, it was the JNA that essentially reduced the Croatian city of Vukovar to rubble, followed by the shelling of Dubrovnik, Karlovac, and others. The following year, it was Sarajevo's turn -- initially fired upon by the JNA before a Yugoslav army morphed into a Bosnian Serb one.

The JNA's role as detailed in the newly published "dossier" recalls my own experience of the start of the war in Sarajevo. In late April 1992, the JNA was shooting at targets throughout the city, including the TV transmitter on Hum Hill that was visible from my balcony. Because it was shaped like a needle, it was not an easy target. Shells were landing all over the place, missing Hum and hitting nearby buildings.

Then came a telephone call. It was from Belgrade’s Radio Politika, which wanted to know what was happening in Sarajevo. At first, I was happy that someone in Belgrade wanted to know what was going on. Breathlessly, I reported on the army's movements and the shelling of the Hum transmitter. A very polite reporter at the other end then asked me if I could repeat what I had just described -- the shelling, the destruction -- and mention all of the locations in the city that were being hit, but that I should avoid mentioning the Yugoslav Army. Radio Politika wanted me to say that I did not know who was doing the shooting. I told the Belgrade reporter: 'I'm sorry, but I can see the red stars on the Yugoslav Army tanks with my own eyes.'

The journalist on the Belgrade end apologized, saying he simply couldn't broadcast a report in which the army is blamed for shooting at civilian targets.

That was the end of our conversation.

I never got another call from a Belgrade-based radio station.

In 1992, it didn't take a Serb nationalist to be incredulous that the JNA, which was meant to protect us all, might be shelling its own people. The truth took a while to sink in, even for those who were the JNA's targets or unintended victims in the early days of the war.

That's what makes these new findings by the Belgrade Center for Humanitarian Law even more significant.

The views expressed in this blog post do not necessarily reflect those of RFE/RL.

Bosnian Serb leader Milorad Dodik's latest gambit is his declared intention to run for the Bosnian presidency in October -- thereby becoming a member of a tripartite executive branch of a country he does not support, and from which he wishes to secede.

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Bosnia In Crosshairs Of Ethnic Nationalists And Their Allies

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"Foreigners giving up on Bosnia: country close to collapse."

That's a recent headline from Sputnik, the Russian state media arm in Serbia since 2015.

The accompanying photo -- a sepia-toned panoramic shot of Muslim gravestones overlooking the city of Sarajevo, overlaid by a spectrally transparent image of a Bosnian flag -- appears likewise meant to convey imminent doom. It might not be a surprise, given Sputnik's (and Russian media in general's) vocal support for Milorad Dodik, the president of Republika Srpska who routinely predicts Bosnia-Herzegovina's demise.

The irony, of course, is that critics accuse Dodik of doing more than anyone else to impede Bosnia's central institutions and thus make his prophecy a self-fulfilling one. His latest gambit is his declared intention to run for the Bosnian presidency in the October elections -- thereby becoming a member of a tripartite executive branch of a country he does not support, and from which he wishes to secede.

But even impartial observers recognize that Bosnia is in trouble and might need urgent help from abroad. Writing in The Washington Post, Frida Ghitis voiced the fear that Bosnia may be heading back to "the dark old days of the 1990s" and that Europe and the United States, "currently distracted with other problems, must act soon to keep Bosnia from going off the rails."

Moreover, Dodik's Russian-endorsed secessionism is not the only threat to Bosnia's stability.

In the other Bosnian entity, known as the Muslim-Croat Federation, two radically opposed models of government are currently pitted against each other. One would seemingly guarantee the survival of a more-or-less democratic, if still imperfect, system; the other would appear to turn Bosnia into little more than an ethnocracy.

The latter option is being championed by Bosnian Croat political leaders, who insist on the principle that only ethnic Croats should be allowed to elect their political representatives in state institutions. They are demanding a change to the constitution that would limit voting for designated Croatian candidates to the Bosnian presidency or parliamentary committees to ethnic Croats.

Since the system already guarantees ethnic Croat representation in all government bodies, this demand appears to be based on the belief that only Croats chosen exclusively by other Croats would truly defend the interests of their ethnic fellows. It is a view that seemingly regards the idea of civic society and ethnic belonging as fundamentally opposed and unable to coexist.

Foundation Of Fear

The current dispute is only the latest manifestation of a deeply rooted problem in postwar Bosnia, where the only kind of politics is that of identity -- and fear: Each ethnic group feels, or is made to feel, that its customs, religion, and culture are not respected enough and will somehow be obliterated by the others.

Yet the Bosnian Croats, with their present demands -- like Dodik, for his part -- are merely playing by the Dayton playbook. Ethnicity is the foundation of the Dayton peace agreement; and while that was perhaps an acceptable price to pay for peace in 1995, it may no longer serve even that basic purpose. The Bosnian Croats' demands are only the latest reminder that the limits of Dayton might have been reached.

The architect of the peace accord, U.S. diplomat Richard Holbrooke, is no longer alive. He was a pragmatist whose goal was to end a war -- one that had taken at least 100,000 lives -- and could not or did not wish to imagine that more than two decades later, nationalist leaders would invoke Dayton to wage the same war by other means. Holbrooke is no longer around to fix the flaws in Bosnia's governing charter, of course.

Meanwhile, his political master and patron at the time of Dayton, former U.S. President Bill Clinton, has just published a novel, co-written with James Patterson. It features a female Bosnian assassin code-named Bach -- a classical-music-loving, vegetarian, pregnant, cold-blooded killer who wields a semiautomatic rifle that she calls Anna Magdalena. Several reviewers have pointed out that the novel's fictional president, Jonathan Duncan, resembles Clinton's own alter ego, while elements of the plot appear to deliberately echo Clinton's time in office.

If that is so, one might wonder if the specter of Bosnia still haunts Clinton's thoughts -- a sense of guilt over a war interrupted too late and a peace that is looking increasingly like a prelude to another conflict (or far from a lasting solution) -- personified in an assassin on the loose.

Glimmer Of Hope?

Beyond the Russian spin, nationalist demagoguery, and presidential fiction, what does the future hold for Bosnia?

In a recently published book titled Hunger And Fury: The Crisis Of Democracy, Bosnian academic Jasmin Mujanovic sees hope amid the gloom. Taking aim at both local and foreign prophets of Bosnia's doom, he criticizes an "immobilizing chorus that asks when there will be another war in the Balkans. It is not an exaggeration to say that it is an act of psychological terror to hang this rhetorical sword constantly over the heads of the peoples of the Western Balkans."

Such rhetoric is a tool of the local nationalist elites who use it "to terrorize and thus pacify the impoverished and traumatized masses over which they rule," Mujanovic argues.

Since the signing of the Dayton accords, the West has facilitated the entrenchment of these "ethnic entrepreneurs" in power in exchange for vague and grudgingly repeated promises not to start another war, he says. According to Mujanovic, the growing desperation and feeling of impotence might lead to the unleashed fury of the hungry masses -- with unpredictable consequences.

Mujanovic also expresses hope for what's on the horizon, based on his study of grassroots movements throughout the region committed to social justice and civic democracy.

But the case of Security Minister Dragan Mektic, an ethnic Serb seemingly committed to serving all of Bosnia's citizens and tackling corruption, suggests there are also advocates of change among serving politicians in Bosnia.

The views expressed in this blog post do not necessarily reflect those of RFE/RL

About This Blog

Balkans Without Borders offers personal commentary on contemporary Balkan politics and culture. It is written by Gordana Knezevic, senior journalist and former award-winning editor of the Sarajevo daily Oslobodjenje, as well as the director of RFE/RL’s Balkan Service between 2008 and 2016. The blog reflects on the myriad ways in which the absurdities of Balkan politics and the ongoing historical shifts and realignments affect the lives of people in the region.